The Great Prog Ression

What happens when you lock Dream Theater’s John Petrucci and Misha Mansoor of Periphery in a Wembley dressing room with a fistful of highly flammable questions? TG plays chaperone as two generations of prog metal take on the music industry, the march of technology, internet trolls and the future of guitar.

Words: Henry Yates

There has never been so much talent on one sofa. At one end sits Dream Theater’s John Petrucci: a progmetal silverback whose handshake even oozes virtuosity (we will never wash again). At the other sits Misha Mansoor: a man so gracious and self-deprecatory that he initially seems more like a fan club competition-winner than the leader of metal sensations Periphery. In a few hours, Wembley Arena will bow down to the industrial-strength chops and mindboggling time signatures of these two guitar gods. Before that, there’s the small matter of our prog-metal mini-summit and spiritual baton-handover.

As you’d expect from two musicians with a common goal to shred the rulebook, there’s plenty of mutual respect, but we’re aware this generation game could easily go awry. John and Misha are very different animals. Formed at Berklee College of Music in 1985, Dream Theater took the old-school route to fame and fortune, recording platinum albums in gleaming studios with valve amps and boutique gear. Periphery, by contrast, evolved through Misha’s self-taught mastery of home recording, trial-and-error chops, web-savvy self-promotion and love of modelling gear. This could either be the start of a beautiful relationship or very, very awkward. No wonder TG is squirming in our role as chaperone...

Total Guitar: How does it feel that such ambitious music is selling out Wembley?

Misha Mansoor: Well, it’s not our music: it’s his! We’re not selling out a damn thing!

John Petrucci: It’s great. I still remember our first time coming to London to play the Marquee. Growing up as a kid, it was 10 of us raving about the new Rush album and way into progressive music, but that pocket of kids was as far as it went. Now it’s still pockets of kids, but it’s all out there on the Internet. I always felt there was an audience for this music in the world, it was just a matter of tapping into it.

MM: Dream Theater, I think, are one of the last bands who’ll be able to play music on this level. There’s so much competition, so many bands, all accessible within seconds on YouTube and Facebook... it’s created an even playing field, but there’s less money to go around. I feel lucky to witness this kind of a tour, even as an opener. It’s tough right now.

TG: What do you think of each other’s technique and sound?

MM: [deadpan] I think his sucks.

JP: I’m working on it. I love Misha’s sound. It has aggression, but there’s clarity and it has a personality: it sounds like your tone is talking. You know, Periphery has a sound, and I’ll show my age here, but I have two 16-year-olds and their buddies are so into his style. It’s like you’ve started off a new generation. They’ll say to me, “Why can’t you play something like that?”

MM: Ah, you’re making me cry here! When I was 17, I decided that I needed to become John Petrucci. I’m not joking. Until that point, it was just powerchords, but then I went out and bought a Petrucci seven-string and learned as much Dream Theater as humanly possible. I realized really fast that it was not gonna happen. The hardest part was the alternate picking. I’ve always been rubbish at alternate picking! That was definitely a challenge. This is the master; you can hear the pick attack on every note and it’s always locked in perfectly. More abstract was that it seemed every note was perfectly chosen. I’ve never been impressed with shredders. Y’know, people who turn it into a sport...

JP: It’s just wankery.

MM: Pure guitar wankery. That’s a good British word. We’re trying here, us Americans!

TG: Misha, you’re self-taught, whereas John, you studied at Berklee.

JP: Y’know, it’s interesting hearing Misha tell that story, because I think emulating somebody or the path they took is actually a great way to achieve success. I did the same thing. I said, “Well, Steve Vai went to Berklee: I’d better go to Berklee. Randy Rhoads took his guitar to school: I’m taking my guitar to school.” Berklee was a jazz school, and I didn’t have a lot of jazz background, so getting into some of the chord melody and improv classes was tough but challenging. The way I visualised it is that your playing goes in steps. You get to a plateau, then something clicks and ‘boom’.

MM: I’ve always been the kind of person who says “screw the manual.” It might take longer; because it’s all trial and error; but for me lessons just go in one ear and out the other. I’ve tried learning theory a bunch of times and I end up cheating and using my ear. I mean, guitar playing has been a real struggle for me, because I have really bad technique. It’s like the step thing: it feels like I plateau, then the next day for some reason it starts to makes sense. So sometimes the best thing is to take a week away from the guitar. I’d also hang around musicians who are better than I am, because it’s free guitar lessons.

JP: That’s what I did as a kid. You’d go to the older kids’ houses when they’re jamming. It’s like, “Ah, so that’s how you play ‘Paranoid’. I’ve been doing it all wrong.”

TG: How did your influences inspire your playing techniques?

MM: Another huge influence was Meshuggah, and their ability to do seemingly odd time signatures, but really have it all be in 4/4. I love something you can just bob your head to, right? But what I took away from them was that you can get very playful with your beats, accents and syncopation, and make things that are a straight 4/4 sound like they aren’t. I do that a lot. I listened to a lot of Dream Theater!

JP: I was always a big Rush and Yes fan, and it was like, “Well, these guys are doing it and it doesn’t always have to be 4/4.” It feels great when it is, but that modulation of meters came naturally to me. I also think I come from the school of power picking. Guys like Steve Morse and Al Di Meola were heroes, just the way they seemed so in command of their right and left hand co-ordination, really attacked the strings and ripped through things. It finally clicked when somebody told me what a metronome was.

TG: You both have a huge online presence: what’s the appeal?

JP: It’s completely necessary. The music that we’re playing in Periphery and Dream Theater is not the type of thing that gets mainstream exposure, where somebody can turn on the radio or late-night TV and see the band. The network of fans all connecting, interchanging, trading stories... it’s essential for bands like ours to spread the word.

MM: It’s difficult to monetise music these days, so you can either say, “We need people to buy CDs again!” and get left in the dust, or you can be creative. I’d just post songs online [to SoundClick], and people seemed to dig them and I was always corresponding. Yeah, criticism comes with the territory. It’s a loud minority, and the plain truth is that 99 per cent of these people would never tell you that to your face.

JP: It used to be a pocket of kids hanging out saying ‘that sucks!’, but now it’s posted and everybody joins in. But you have to always maintain self-confidence. You have to be like the horse with the blinders on, because if you lose that identity and play into what everybody’s saying, then you’re losing yourself, and the music isn’t gonna have the same conviction... and then you’re done.

You’ve both recorded at home: has that made you better guitarists?

JP: I certainly don’t have as much experience as Misha. Besides our demos, every Dream Theater album was done in a real studio, and I’m kinda still in that mindset. it’s like, you’re going purposefully to that environment to write, and be creative and record, and everybody’s there, and the coffee machine is going, and the gear is all set up. There’s a certain comfort in that experience. When it’s just you by yourself, it’s a little more lonely and you’re sitting there with your laptop and your guitar...

MM: I think you and I come from completely different worlds. I started out right when computers got powerful enough to make good recordings, and we did our first album in my living room. You said earlier about the metronome; well, recording at home was my metronome, and maybe even better, because you have instant feedback. If you’re trying to double-track and you think you nailed it, and you didn’t, then you know immediately. I think you’ll learn just as much about guitar from recording in front of a computer as you will from the more physical and technical side of things. I learned a lot of tricks and nuances. That’s where you pick up on things like vibrato and how to strike a chord. You realise what makes a guitar player sound the way they do.

JP: I remember being at Berklee and we wanted to record a demo. With all the plug-ins now, you can get an awesome guitar sound, but our version was just a Boss Heavy Metal pedal plugged straight into the four-track. I had the buzziest tone!

MM: But you have the tools to do these things now. I’ve been using Toontrack software [Superior Drummer] from day one to compose. When I write, a beat can completely change the context of a riff, and with Toontrack, once you lay down an idea, you can get playful with it.

TG: Some people think computer-based recording is cheating.

MM: I always thought of the studio as a composition, and it’s you trying to get ideas in here [head] out there. If I get a better sound by hitting a frying pan on the wall, that’s what we’re gonna use!

JP: I look at the studio as a whole different monster. If I’m trying to play something really difficult, and it means I have to shut all the lights off, tie a bandana around my neck and play it 500 times, I’ll do it. I’m not performing. Live is different.

TG: John, you love Mesa valve amps, while Misha, you swear by the Fractal Axe-Fx.

MM: I don’t think modelling is gonna kill off valve amps. People blow things out of proportion on the internet, like, “You shun all tube amps!” but the truth is, I love amps. I listen to his Mark V tone and think, “Ah, maybe I should...”. But for practical purposes, the Axe-Fx is amazing. We didn’t have to rent backline on this tour, we carry our rigs in our carry-ons, we have patch changes controlled by computer – and they’ve never messed up. With my old rigs, you’d hit that stand by switch and the sound didn’t come on, and it’s like, “What did I mess up?” Now, it’s very easy to troubleshoot.

JP: I like both schools. I’ve always played amps and I always will. In the studio and live, there’s nothing Like the interaction of a guitar cranking through a Boogie. It’s like a drug to me. But the guys at Fractal have come up with an incredible piece of gear that I use in my rig for all the processing effects, my choruses, delays, pitch shifters... We wrote the whole Dramatic Turn Of Events record with the Axe-Fx in the studio, so when we’re sat in a circle writing, I don’t have stuff cranking behind me. We did all the demos with that, then went in and re-recorded it.

MM: Happy accidents do still happen with modelling. When I had an amp, you’d be stoked with a tone but then naturally you’d get bored and want to tweak it, but you were kinda trapped. With the Axe-Fx, you have all these models, and it reacts very much like an amp, where you set everything to noon and tweak from there. You actually stumble across quite a bit of stuff...

JP: I think the challenge for the modelling industry is the dynamics. If I roll off the volume and I’m maybe plucking the strings and building a solo, like in ‘Breaking All Illusions’... I remember doing the demo, and I couldn’t get the expression with the direct sound. It sounded a little bit homogenous, and then when it came to plugging into the amp, it naturally came, like the way a note would balloon or compress based on what the amp was doing, that dynamic nature.

You’re also quite different when it comes to guitars. John, you’re faithful to Music Man...

JP: They were designed specifically to be the perfect guitar for my playing, my hands, my body, my amp, so I’ve never been tempted by anything else. On the road, I take out a few older signature models, but in the studio, for this album, I just used the latest, the JP12. Really, the big difference is that we changed the body wood. Instead of being made of alder, it’s a basswood version. The first JP guitar was basswood and I really enjoyed it, then I kinda said, “Ah, let’s try some other woods...” Now I got into this heads pace of going back to the basswood with a mahogany tone block and a maple top. And the combination of those three woods is perfect.

TG: ...whereas Misha, you flit around.

MM: I’ve always been non-exclusive! It would suck if I had to stop playing what I like just because I’m a professional musician. I think it’s an incredible format for an instrument: there’s so many possibilities. You have fanned frets, different scale lengths, body woods. Right now, on the road, I’m taking this Jackson Custom Shop seven-string [with basswood body and maple neck]. It just fits. I’ve also got this gorgeous Daemoness Cimmerian [with korina body and maple top] from a builder in Bristol who does the most insane inlay work, and that guitar probably sounds the most like where I’m at right now. Just today, I received my revised version of my headless Strandberg, which I’m excited to try at sound check tonight. In all of them, I’m using Bare Knuckle Aftermath pickups. In the studio, I use DiMarzios and a wide range of Bare Knuckle stuff, but for live, and for the stop-start stuff and tight stuff, the Aftermath has the perfect response. My criteria for a good guitar is not even specs. It’s that you play it, you smile, and you write ideas off it.

TG: If kids have shorter attention spans, does that mean virtuosity will die out?

MM: No, I think kids are gonna get even more amazing. I mean, I have a short attention span, but when I’m working on guitar, I get hyper-focused. I think music will get better and better. When I picked up the guitar, I remember thinking Green Day, The Offspring and Nirvana were the pinnacle of guitar playing. Then I got introduced to bands like Dream Theater, and it was like, ‘whoa’. So that becomes the new bar.

JP: Electric guitars haven’t been around for that long, anyway. Think about guitar in the 50s, and who was the greatest guitar guy, playing fast chords or whatever. Then it was Hendrix, Clapton and Page, then you move on, and you have Satriani, Vai, Rhoads, and then... you have an eight year old on YouTube who can shred Paganini, and it’s like, that’s the norm now. So it’s totally going to progress.

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A Few Of Our Favourite Things

John and Misha on their proudest guitar moments

MM: Honestly, I look back and always think, “I could have done all that better.” I’m not saying I’m not proud of what I’ve done, but I’m still learning, man. My favourite guitar moment from the debut album is ‘Racecar’, that 15-minute-long one that I wrote with Jake [Bowen]. We didn’t want it to be a long song, but it was just like, riff, riff, riff.

JP: I always look at my latest work as what I’m most proud of. That’s what signifies where I am as a player right now. On the new album [A Dramatic Turn of Events], there’s a really extensive solo on ‘Lost Not Forgotten’ – it goes in and out of a whole bunch of different personalities.

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The Click Clique

Misha and John agree on one thing: a click track is essential

MM: People say “don’t be a slave to the click”, and I get that you don’t want to be cold or clinical, but it’s just to make sure you’re playing tight. It won’t ruin you as a musician! On our latest album, we have every section at a slightly different tempo to create this push-and-pull, and the beauty is that, live, I have a bit of click going, so we can just put that tempo map into there while still remaining tight.

JP: You can make the click do whatever you want. It’s a compositional tool, like if you were laying out the click in a programme, that becomes your map. it’s easy for editing, easy for jumping from one place to the next, easy for making sure stuff is in sync. It’s a pre-production necessity. If you just have blank space. it’s so much more difficult.